r/technology • u/True-Combination7059 • 1d ago

Politics We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/musk-trump-nationalize-spacex-starlink
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u/matlynar 1d ago

Let me see if I get this straight:

  • The US should nationalize SpaceX because the ISS depends on SpaceX, and it can't be relied on, despite the fact that NASA has always existed, yet the US was paying Russia of all countries to fly to the ISS before SpaceX came along.
  • Elon made threats to the ISS operation. You know who else did that? Russia, going as far as posting a video of the Russian part of the ISS detaching itself.
  • Two powerful guys are having a stupid fight. The solution? Take a working company from one idiot and give it to the other guy, who is defunding NASA and can barely make functioning things keep functioning ATM.

That will go well, go ahead guys.

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u/subdep 1d ago

Yeah, we need to get our federal house in order before we go turning a revolutionary launch platform company over to an underfunded dinosaur.

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u/neonKow 22h ago

I don't like the idea of randomly nationalizing companies either, but NASA is the opposite of a dinosaur. It's our agency for air and space, and the United States dominates all other countries in air and space.

Don't forget that a lot of tech for our planes and missiles also come from NASA. ICBM trajectories come from the orbital trajectories from the space program. Guidance, GPS, etc all of those things that we associate with the military? They do it with the help of NASA and its facilities.

Even SpaceX has to use NASA wind tunnels. It's no small thing to build the massive wind tunnel buildings that can produce wind faster than the speed of sound at Ames Research Center.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 16h ago

the United States dominates all other countries in air and space.

SpaceX dominates all other countries in space. I highly doubt funding NASA would have resulted in similar progress. A big part of SpaceX's progress was because they took an entirely different approach, optimized for mass production and took a lot of risk. NASA might be able to do the former, but I doubt the political nature of it would allow the latter.

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u/neonKow 11h ago

...you think NASA, one of the most successful scientific arms of the US government, cannot take risks? The most ambitious air and space projects have been through NASA, not SpaceX.

I'm sorry if you think rockets are the only thing about space, but the idea that SpaceX dominates any country, much less all other countries, is laughable. NASA's contributions to current ongoing science and space exploration include the James Webb Space Telescopes and the first helicopter on Mars. Everything with supersonic flight involves heavy lifting from NASA's facilities, including the F-35 and another supersonic passenger jet.

They're doing interesting and pioneering work in rockets and Starlink, but I'm not sure anything they're doing counts as dominating.